On Friendship: One Hundred Maxims for a Chinese Prince

ON FRIENDSHIP

Matteo Ricci and Xu Guangqi, from Athanasius Kircher, China Illustrata (1667). (Collection of the translator)

ON FRIENDSHIP

One Hundred Maxims for a Chinese Prince

MATTEO RICCI

Translated by

TIMOTHY BILLINGS

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

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Copyright © 2009 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-52028-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ricci, Matteo, 1552–1610.

[ Jiaoyou lun. English]

On friendship : one hundred maxims for a Chinese prince /

Matteo Ricci ; translated by Timothy Billings.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-14924-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-52028-7 (e-book)

1. Friendship—Quotations, maxims, etc. 2. Conduct of life—Quotations,

maxims, etc. I. Billings, Timothy James, 1963– II. Title.

BJ1533.F8R4913 2009

177’.62—dc22

2009019567

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For

Natasha V. Chang

and

Haun Saussy

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

inline-image / ON FRIENDSHIP

Chronology of Editions

Texts and Variants

Sources and Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Anyone who has ever written a book knows what it means to rely on friends of many qualities and degrees for support, but it is rare to write a book that forces one constantly to reflect on the nature of the friendships that have enabled one to write a book. I have felt the temptation to thank absolutely everyone whom I have ever regarded with the slightest hint of amical affection and to boast myself rich in the possession of so many friends, both illustrious and little known. But I am persuaded to allow my friends both distant and close to recognize themselves in the pages herein, and to content myself with naming only those who have contributed materially to the production of this book. Foremost among them is Jennifer Crewe, the best friend a scholar could hope to have. Without her sponsorship, this book might never have seen print. For reading drafts at various stages and contributing invaluable criticism, I am indebted to Andrew Lo and Haun Saussy, as well as to David Mungello and Thierry Meynard. They have honored this book with their attention, and it is so much the better for their comments. Thanks also to Yan Zinan for his willingness to puzzle out difficult passages with a ready laugh, to Zhang Kai for helping me resolve the last grammatical puzzle, to Chen Liyuan for the early support that launched this project, to Emily Asher for drafting the index, and to Mike Ashby for his meticulous and informed copyediting. I would also like to thank the American Academy in Rome, where I drafted a portion of this translation, especially Pina Pasquantonio, for making my visit there so comfortable. I owe a debt of gratitude to the staff in the manuscripts departments of the British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, and the Biblioteca nazionale centrale, but most of all to the exceptionally warm and helpful staff at the library of the Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, at the Collège de France, Paris, whom I shall dare to call my friends. I owe a debt to Middlebury College not only for giving me a home with many friends but also for allowing me to leave it, as well as for a subvention that supported the publication of this book. Most of all, I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to the board of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the extremely generous New Directions Fellowship, which made research for this book and other incipient projects possible—especially to Joseph Miesel, who facilitated every stage of my research and travel with alacrity.

Most people should not embark casually upon writing a book, because a book claims a portion of one’s life and changes it. For my part, I did not elect this book casually, but rather decided deliberately one day to write it in order to have something worthy of Haun Saussy, whose friendship has buoyed me as I imagine the great friendships of antiquity once comforted and nourished those more eminent than I could ever hope to be. I cannot help but feel that the product falls short of that worthiness, but I know that he will accept it nevertheless—just as he will accept that I cannot dedicate it solely to him because of that other, singular friend who rejoices and suffers with me daily, and who has done so daily as I labored to bring this book to completion. The ancients would no doubt be disappointed with me for making the classic mistake of confusing love with friendship, but I am certain that Natasha Chang is not just the love of my life but also the best friend that I have ever known, my other half, my other self. If Haun was the reason I started this book, Natasha is the reason I finished it. And so it is to them both that I dedicate it.

INTRODUCTION

A FRIEND FROM AFAR

In 1595, when an upstart player named William Shakespeare was writing a fantastical comedy in English verse called A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the London stage, on the opposite side of the globe, in the southern Chinese city of Nanchang , an equally remarkable man named Matteo Ricci was composing an essay on friendship in the formal diction of classical Chinese. Ricci called his essay simply You lun (Essay on Friends), a title that would later be changed under the influence of one of Ricci’s many Chinese friends to the more resonant Jiaoyou lun (Essay on Friendship), the name by which it is known and loved by Chinese intellectuals even today.

For many readers, Matteo Ricci needs no introduction. To anyone with a high-school education in China, he is also instantly recognizable by the Chinese name that he chose for himself, Li Madou . As a talented scholar with an extraordinary memory and a gift for languages, as the most eminent cofounder of the Jesuit mission in China (which Saint Francis Xavier had struggled in vain to establish shortly before his death off the coast of China in 1552), as the first European to gain access to the imperial Forbidden City in Beijing, and as the first European to have his writings included in an imperial anthology (including this essay on friendship), Ricci has become almost legendary as a figure who braved apparently insurmountable odds in order to forge meaningful cultural connections between Europe and China. Even as a Christian missionary whose chief aim was the saving of souls through baptism and conversion, Ricci has been admired—and also severely criticized—for his attempts to adapt or accommodate Christian teachings to Chinese cultural expectations in addition to spreading secular European knowledge related to cartography, mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, philosophy, music, and visual art. After a dozen tumultuous years in southern China, Ricci was still five years away from obtaining permission to visit the imperial court in Beijing at the time that he wrote this essay on friendship, but his intelligence and his familiarity with the Confucian classics along with his dignified bearing had already begun to earn him influential Chinese friends of the scholar-official class. The essay would win him many more.

In fact, the staggering popularity of the essay was to play a crucial role in all his subsequent missionary efforts by establishing Ricci’s reputation as a Western sage whose unusual teachings were worthy of consideration. Within a year of its composition, Ricci wrote in a letter to Rome: There are so many people who ask to see it and to transcribe it that I never have any copies on hand to show.¹ The same year, in 1596, a local official from a nearby town who had become a great friend to the Jesuits decided to have it published without Ricci’s knowledge.² (Ricci stressed this point, since the Jesuits were not allowed to print without approval from Rome, which could take years, but in the same letter he also praised the friend’s good soul for doing so.) Within the next five years, two other editions were independently printed, in 1599 and 1601, by two other Chinese friends, also without Ricci’s permission or knowledge, thus quickly turning it into the late Ming equivalent of a best seller. In a letter of 1599, Ricci wrote: "This Friendship has earned more credit for me and for our Europe than anything else that we have done; because the others do us credit for mechanical and artificial things of hands and tools; but this does us credit for literature, for wit, and for virtue.³ A decade later, in 1609, when Ricci was compiling his journals for later publication in Europe, he reported that the essay still astounds all the kingdom" (fa stupire a tutto questo regno), that it had been repeatedly printed both in Beijing and in other provinces with great applause from all scholars, that it had made for him many friendships and caused him to be known by many important people, and that it had already begun to be quoted in important Chinese books.⁴

Ricci probably knew that as early as 1602 about a third of the essay had been excerpted with slight revisions to the style in Wang Kentang’s (1549–1613) influential anthology Yugang zhai bizhu (Pen Notes from the Lush Ridge Studio).⁵ But the extraordinary popularity of the work is demonstrated by its repeated anthologizing in full or in part by other Chinese writers after Ricci’s death, including such authors as Wu Congxian (1614), Chen Jiru (1615), Jiang Xuqi (1616), Feng Kebin (1622), Zhu Tingdan (1626), and Tao Zongyi (1646).⁶ In addition to all these versions, Ricci’s friend and former collaborator, Li Zhizao (1565–1630), prepared what has long been considered to be the definitive edition